It is not likely that the United States intelligence community thinks of journalist Glenn Greenwald as polite. The fact is, however, he’s been very nicely raised. In the hotel lobby, he extends a hand and says, “Helen, good to meet you” while appearing to mean it, notwithstanding a schedule more congested than the databanks of the NSA, and his very urgent need to have a question addressed.

“I have to know,” he says next, as he shows me an image of Malcolm Turnbull just captured on his smartphone, “Is this your Prime Minister?”

“That,” I say, “is a powerful specimen of our slow national collapse. Yes. It’s Mal.”

The frequent flyer had taken his legs out for a stretch that day and accidentally landed right in the middle of a doorstop. Turnbull had given over his Sunday morning to a little anti-terrorist theatre with uniformed men, while Greenwald had actively given his to criticism of such a political performance. In partnership with Greenwald’s news site The Intercept, ABC Radio’s Background Briefing had just aired investigation, based on several of the many Snowden files, of the function of Pine Gap. The reports suggest that the “mutually beneficial” relationship between Australia and the US is regularly consummated at that base. Australia is, according to the report, actively complicit in mass surveillance of other nations. The documents suggest Australia is complicit in the invasion of privacy and the maintenance of war.

“So, it was Turnbull. I am so annoyed. I would have asked him a question about the base. I should have. I nearly did. But, frankly, he looked so much like a generic centrist Western politician, I couldn’t be sure. Damn!”

As the sort of reporter who has never received documents more confidential than an employee’s handbook for a lingerie store I’m a bit overcome. What do you say to a guy whose working life has been given over these past years to the careful and fearless dissemination of evidence showing that the US hegemon retains its power by shocking means? One who regrets any missed opportunity to interrogate a political leader, and is kicking himself for failing to disturb a photo op with something like the truth. You say something dumb, of course.

“Well. Um. You can’t say that your new American president looks generic.”

As we make our way to a food hall, we speak about how Trump can be viewed in two contexts. Both as generic and very particular; as both continuous with The Washington Consensus and as a very significant break.

“There are interesting questions that arise when considering Trump as either continuity or discontinuity,” he says. “One of the benefits he’s provided to the elite class of opinion makers and policymakers is that they are, in being stubbornly opposed to everything he does, permitted the expiation of their own sins.”

All those American activities that these policymakers or pundits have themselves long done, or endorsed, are forgotten and rewritten. Press and politicians create fictitious histories for themselves in their opposition to Trump, as we can see here with “liberal” newspaper The Washington Post that, in 2003, named the US invasion of Iraq as “an operation essential to American security”. The paper is now eager to fact-check Trump’s post-hoc opposition to the war — as it should — but is fairly silent on the matter of its own support for that war, or its more recent hawkishness when it declared the invasion of Libya a success.

American liberals rewrite their own histories in the era of Trump, but also the history of a nation, says Greenwald. “The most salient example of this, I think, was when Trump invited General Sisi to the White House.” In a move described as the President’s “springtime for despots”, pundits and officials made like the US had never in its glorious history of unending peace offered support to unpleasant leaders.

“There was a very broad sense of ‘how can an American president embrace a despot and a pirate?’ Which is, in fact, an attempt to create an alternative history in which American presidents have opposed dictatorships throughout the world. When, in fact, the whole policy of the US in the post-World War II era has been to prop up the world’s worst despots, to retain hegemony over the world.”

Trump does express continuity in matters of US foreign policy. But, he does so crudely and openly. In interview with former Fox News broadcaster Bill O’Reilly, Trump defended his relatively favourable opinion of Vladimir Putin. Liberal pundits, those who are shriven for their former sin — as though good relations with Russia were ever sinful — were able to express shock at Trump’s reply to O’Reilly’s claims that Putin was a monster, “You think our country’s so innocent?” and simultaneously forget the recent amicable relationship between Hillary Clinton and the Russian leader.

“I can only say that I feel that the US is undergoing some sort of collective mania,” says Greenwald of the liberal nervous breakdown so easily seen in press. Policies that were once, and very recently, enthusiastically endorsed are now seen as abhorrent. Trump is, in much of his policy, continuous. But he must be seen at all costs as discontinuous.

“I am impatient with the pretence that all of the things that he has done are bad and are unique to him,” says Greenwald. He is also impatient with the refusal by journalists, politicians and those others who see anything that is not Trump as “resistance” to identify other forms of power.

“There are a lot of centres of power. Many of them are antithetical to Trump, opposed to Trump. Many of them are more powerful than Trump, and are proving more powerful than Trump. These need critical scrutiny as urgently as Trump does, but they’re not getting it.”

This, in my view, is true. Journalists are now inclined to scoff at the idea of the Deep State, to view all Washington bureaucrats as benign. The only deviation to American goodness and the true centre of evil is Trump. This is the neoliberal nervous breakdown, the collective mania Greenwald identifies.

“This fixation on seeing him as discontinuous, as an aberration. As though he were the only president not devoted to the promotion of freedom and democracy.”

“It is disturbing to watch the values that are being supported at the cost of opposing Trump. The idea that all you have to do is tear Trump out of the White House and everything will be back to normal is a false reading of history and of reality.”

To be gracelessly clear, Greenwald, despite many claims to the contrary, is not an advocate for Trump. It was more than a year ago that he said in interview that the simple revulsion many analysts had for Trump dangerously eclipsed a clear view. Not only is our vision of other centres of power obscured by the reflex loathing of Trump, but Trump himself as a policymaker shifts from view.

In some part, says Greenwald, “the people who are most indignant and sanctimonious about Trump actively caused him.”

Part three of this interview will describe the way in which Greenwald sees the knowledge and political classes — those who are indignant and sanctimonious — as responsible for the rise of Trump, and hopes for a post-Trumpist West.